UX Design: Personas, Part 2 (For the individual designer)

My goal is to be working as a software developer before the year 2016. My website will help me achieve this goal by showing local tech folk my knowledge, skills and achievements. All updates to this project can be found on the main project page.

A Realization That I am Only One Person

The initial survey I created to better understand my audience was 52 questions long. I asked a few local UX professionals about it and they pointed out that it was entirely too long. I used these questions in a 40 minute interview with a technical recruiter who was nice enough to give me some of her time even though the interview was too long. I also had the realization that as one person working on the design and development of my website, 52 points of information is probably way too much for me to handle.

An in depth guide is great for a team of designers who are creating requirements for a team of developers, but as one person doing it all I needed to scale it down a bit.

Just the Facts

After my initial request for survey responses only garnered one response and one interview, I decided to take a different tactic. I asked myself

“What is it I REALLY want to know about my audience?”

I realized that, for this project, my audience’s gender and personality type are not as important to me. What I really care about is how they use my website and what they want from it, so I decided to redesign my survey. My redesigned survey can be found here. I sent the new survey out to those within my network that I consider to be recruiters and curious developers which gave me more responses.

My Personas

My personas are based off of the super helpful DIY User Personas post by UX-Lady. They are also hand drawn because pens and markers are easier for me to use than publishing software.

A person who makes hiring decisions regarding software developers:

A curious programmer:

What’s Next?

This process has pointed out to me that I am not the designer-type. This is the end of this process for now. It’s been eye-opening to dig into the Discovery stop of the UX Design process. If you’re more design oriented than I am then check out the links in my Learning UX Design: Strategy and Learning UX Design: Design posts.